What project MD29 buys
Strategic competitors and both homeland and regional adversaries are heavily investing in hypersonics, both offense and defense, and currently have operational hypersonic strike and defensive systems deployed. These are challenging realities of the emerging missile threat environment that United States Missile Defense policy, strategy, and capabilities must address. These adversaries continue to expand the capability and capacity of their offensive and defensive hypersonic missile inventories for both strategic and regional hypersonic missiles. Near Peer/Peer nations have also demonstrated hypersonic missiles in flight tests. The Hypersonic Defense program element includes executing systems engineering activities, upgrading existing systems, investing in new technologies and maturation, and developing new regional and homeland defensive capabilities. Missile Defense Agency's (MDA) counter hypersonic threats strategy includes leveraging existing systems, delivering an initial regional and homeland layered defense capability, and increasing defense capabilities in the future. Activities enabling this strategy are the following: - Develop a land and sea-based Glide Phase Intercept capability to engage hypersonic threats during the glide phase of flight and other threats of multi-mission areas. - Develop requirements to integrate Glide Phase Intercept capability into the Missile Defense System-Next capabilities in support of the President's Executive Order 14186. - Execute systems engineering for Hypersonic Defense, including architecture analysis, technology prioritization, requirements development, planning, and analysis. - Partner with the Services and other agencies to leverage land and sea-based work on common technologies, test infrastructure, weapon development, testing, and war-gaming. - Cooperatively develop the Glide Phase Interceptor with Japan.
- Product Development
- Support
- Test and Evaluation
Project MD29 funding, FY2025–FY2031
Prior years are actuals, the budget year is the request, and the outyears are the FYDP plan. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure. Projects carry the full five-year plan; the activities inside them stop at the budget year.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 168.8 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 167.5 |
| FY2027 | Request | 205.7 |
| FY2028 | Outyear | 241.1 |
| FY2029 | Outyear | 321.1 |
| FY2030 | Outyear | 377.4 |
| FY2031 | Outyear | 377.7 |
2 accomplishments / planned programs
The R-2A exhibit — the only level of the budget that describes work that has not happened yet. Activities carry the prior, current and budget year only, no five-year plan. 1 of them describes FY2027 work in enough detail to have its own page; the rest are shown here in full. Coverage is partial across the corpus, so count activities, never total them.
Leverage and Upgrade Existing Systems: - Continue engineering, planning, and foundational upgrades to land and sea-based capability to support acceleration of regional and homeland Aegis Glide Phase Interceptor capability. - Provide BOA and C2BMC algorithm development and prototyping for low latency tracks as foundational efforts to…
Read the FY2027 plan →FY2026 to FY2027 change Decrease from FY 2026 to FY 2027 reflects the transition of funding to the R-2a accomplishment (Hypersonic Missile Defense Capability) to better reflect the regional and homeland defense capability of the Glide Phase Interceptor.
FY2026 plans — current year Aegis Weapon System: - Evolve and mature systems engineering efforts to continue the flow of system level requirements to subsystem requirement specifications and continue preliminary design activities. - Develop updated weapon system code to support demonstration of capability in partner flight tests and flight experiments and leverage results of flight tests enhance Glide Phase Interceptor designs and inform future development. - Continue refinement of engagement and shot selection algorithms to optimize performance across the Glide Phase Interceptor threat and battlespace. Missile System: - Continue to evolve and mature a single missile system design. - Build and test early subsystem…
Named performers on project MD29
Performers named in the R-3 exhibit under this project. Share is of the project's whole FY2027 R-3 total — the same denominator the program-element split uses, so the two read on one scale and will not sum to 100% when unnamed or government work is in the mix. Budget-justification contract funding, not obligations.